Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The answer he gave, which was either extremely Finnish or extremely religious, is that it has to come from a genuine, bottom-up commitment. That's why turning off lightbulbs is important. To turn off the light when you leave a room is an act of piety just as much as lighting a candle in church. It has no measurable effect on the crisis at all in itself. It doesn't even have a notable effect on your own electricity bill, and if it ever does, the world economy will be in a dreadful mess. But it is a token of seriousness. It is, if you like, a gesture of faith.

So San Francisco tried to ban the Happy Meal.
Because clearly parents were helpless and happless at raising children and the State had to come in to keep that eeeevvvviiil Clown from bribing kids with those nefarious toys.

It turns out San Francisco has not entirely vanquished the Happy Meal as we know it. Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn't come with a toy. For that, you'll have to pay an extra 10 cents.

Huh. That hardly seems to have solved the problem (though adults and children purchasing unhealthy food can at least take solace that the 10 cents is going to Ronald McDonald House charities). But it actually gets worse from here. Thanks to Supervisor Eric Mar's much-ballyhooed new law, parents browbeaten into supplementing their preteens' Happy Meal toy collections are now mandated to buy the Happy Meals.

Today and tomorrow mark the last days that put-upon parents can satiate their youngsters by simply throwing down $2.18 for a Happy Meal toy. But, thanks to the new law taking effect on Dec. 1, this is no longer permitted. Now, in order to have the privilege of making a 10-cent charitable donation in exchange for the toy, you must buy the Happy Meal. Hilariously, it appears Mar et al., in their desire to keep McDonald's from selling grease and fat to kids with the lure of a toy have now actually incentivized the purchase of that grease and fat -- when, beforehand, a put-upon parent could get out cheaper and healthier with just the damn toy.

That's right.

What did this smugly touted and bragged about law accomplish? It made happy meal toys a bit more expensive and it made the happy meal itself (the very part they were worried about) mandatory.

That prettymuch sums up the nanny state in a nutshell, condescending, expensive, and counter productive. Remember these same Statists thought they knew how to better feed children than their own parents, and yet they couldn't get this law right.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Talk with some of the "The Police are Oppressors!" groups and you get a litany of police wrongs.
And there's a lot to be worried about from no-knock raids, to random TSA checkpoints, to SWAT/Ninja/militarization to the repeal of the Peelian Principles.

There's also those who are against the police for breaking up their blockades, going against their squatting, and screaming about how they tend to arrest criminals.

The problem is often the methods the Police use on "hippie womping" can be quite wrong.

Here's a pretty good litmus test I've found. Ask them about "Only Ones". If they think the State (police, military, ect) are the only ones that should have arms, then they're not against a disparity of force among the Organs of the State. No they just want the State at their beck and call.

Similarly ask them about May Issue. If someone is perfectly fine with the Police having discretionary powers on who can and cannot bear or own a gun. Well... you have to wonder what other fundamental rights they'd be okay with the Police having control over.

Remember some people that complain about Police Brutality do so not because of the brutality but because of the Policeman's choice in target.

After canvassing local chain drug and grocery stores, we’ve found out that you can no longer buy iodine to treat small cuts and skin abrasions. The reason is that meth dealers use it to make their product. This ban is a fairly recent development.

A law abiding citizen can’t perform simple first aid at home because somebody else might use the product illegally. Same for decongestants, but at least I was able to buy them after registering at the pharmacy desk.

The war on drugs being used as part of the statist and prohibitionist agenda?

Sunday, November 20, 2011

For added irony, the $700 a dollar night, Gordon Gekko unleashing(in the hotel's words), hotel is called the W Hotel.

Well, what's a popular revolution without "the right" people at the helm?

Speaking of having the "right" leader in charge Tam is powerful with the snark today. Sure, the media is pushing Romney as the great white hope and only sane man in the room but really...

They assert this, of course, because only within twenty miles of Beacon Hill does Mitt qualify as "Conservative". Outside of a few coastal enclaves, he's perceived as slightly to the left of the local Democrats and viewed askance as some kind of #OCCUPY_THE_WHITE_HOUSE hippie pinko. There'd be nothing like a Romney-Obama race to encourage Republican voters to stay home in droves, and Barry would beat him like a drum.

Further, even if by some fluke Romney were to win, you'd be replacing a crony capitalist anti-gun politician who was in favor of socialized medicine with a crony capitalist anti-gun politician who was in favor of socialized medicine, but who used a higher SPF sunscreen and wore faith-based underoos.

Nothing like pushing a weak candidate to increase Dear Reader's chances of winning, while also having a safety net ensuring that even if Obama looses, the statists win.

Have you really stepped back and looked at this Jim Rose Circus you're trotting out in front of the American people? Are you guys trying to throw this election? Or has the job become so onerous that no decent person with an ounce of brains would seriously apply for it anymore?

Y'all are facing the most easily-defeatable incumbent since 1980; he even just gave an actual "malaise" speech for opposing speechwriters to rip up. Whether I agree with their positions or not, I have to say that Christie, Palin, or Daniels would have beat this guy like a piñata. With none of them in the race, that leaves Ron Paul as your sober-sided elder statesman on those debate stages. Let that sink in for a minute.

The current slate is starting to look like the Island of Misfit Toys. (Romney is the Train With Square Wheels.)

And Perry is the cowboy on the ostrich. Is Paul the squirt gun that shoots jelly?

Being able to propel a mass at high velocity in a controllable and reliable manner is very useful.

As Wee'rd says: "Obviously defensive, military, sport, and food-harvesting applications are where guns shine... Guns are tools, some less mature people may not LIKE the jobs they’re good for, but that doesn’t make them any less tools."

And for the curious here's my comment on Weer'd's where I explain my wiki-wander

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Romney: “I am not going to walk away from that. It’s right for states to come up with their own solutions. I doubt other people are going try and follow the one we put together. Maybe learn from our experience. Maybe come up with something better. But the wrong course is to have the federal government impose its will on the entire nation.”

Get that? Statehouses and Governors can impose their will on the entire state, but somehow the same action is wrong for President and Congress to do for a nation. I wonder what size governmental organization is acceptable? Clearly Massachusetts is okay but what about a larger state? Or what about a smaller nation?

Well, Romney still clings to Romneycare being somehow "different" from Obamcare. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

I did too a couple days ago, and that gave me the push to write my own thoughts on the book.

Roberta: "It's a sort of cyberdectective novel, but very different. And it's set in Scotland, so it might as well be on Ganymede..."

No kidding, the cyber-future version of the Scotland:
* Euro-philic (euros only please),
* Green-lovin'(not a dimplomat? then you can't have a car),
* Security state (the State watches everything you browse do and build can't have you making guns boyo),
* "Responsible" corporatism (Precrime has been brought to the corporate world with auditors pouring over companies that are "irresponsible" with their "corporate personhood". So don't even *think* about "immoral" layoffs or outsourcing. So corporations have to pledge their allegiance to the State? Huh, familiar.),
* Nationalized supermarkets (because they took out nearly every other shop in the nation and were deemed "too big to fail"),
* Totally disamred (having a gun is likened to having child porn)

Yeah, it's pretty alien.

Oh and while they have drug legalization, heroin smuggling is still very proffitable and making your own meth is quite illegal. Maybe the former is a revenuer situation and the latter is a safety situation. Or maybe the State doesn't want you having your own supply of "candy" and wants the State-Owned Tesco your only sorce.

Reading it, I thought it was an okay book, a bit too "by the numbers" for Stross: too similar to its predecessor "Halting State". Then the ending came and it all clicked. And his choices of narrative strcuture and perspective became abundantly clear. I still think the ending was rushed in execution and rather unpolishsed though, but all in all it was a fun book.

On the other hand, it shows how a hyper gun control state could exist in a world where 3D printers are ubiquitous. For one metal fabrication is a rare thing in that world, two your raw materials are tracked by the goverment (yes plastic pellets are a controled substance), three there's a near constant surveillance state so if you try to use whatever you've fabbed you'll be spotted.

Meanwhile in the US it seems that gun control didn't happen but a 90% top marginal tax rate did. With the expected wealth flight. Amusingly, Stross says that the mass US debt was all due to US imperialism and military spending, and glosses over the debts and resultant taxation European nations would have incurred.

Oh yes, and Scotland still has functional single-payer healthcare. Which is all a piece of the same perspective that felt that all the economic woes were caused purely by greedy irresponsible corporations.

And this really made me chuckle sadly: In one scene two detectives run into a perp on the stairs and they're reduced to trying "good old fisticuffs" against him. Needless to say the perp just womps 'em with a suitcase. That's a pretty good example of how mass disarmament makes bullies into kings.

What makes it more chilling is another character who was afraid of the perp came to one of the cops for protection and stayed with her for a bit. So... if the perp had attacked them... what exactly would the cop have done?

There's also the higher education bubble popping. Where a previously mentioned cop, mid level police inspector, still can't pay off her student loans.

And of course, in the back story there's a paranoid American family that lives out in Nevada on a compound with a bunker. And the father of the family is "a man of faith" with this as his "bible" The End of America: How the Federal Government, the IRS and the Insurance Industry plan to use the UN to Destroy America, and how you can resist.

And that made me really laugh. Given Stross had painted a weakened, impoverished US with hideously high taxes, massive regulation, a fishbowl panopticon. And a Scotland with much the same, save for even more surveillance, no personal car ownership, no guns, company loyalty inspections, and, oh yes, government controlled food distribution.

Yeah... kinda makes a book with a title like that seem pretty sensible.

Still was a fun book, but you may have to put it down every once in a while and shake your head at the dystopia painted within. Not that it's not too far from the current UK.

If you had showed up in that gun store of 1995 and told everybody that you were a time traveler from a 2011 where the AWB had sunset; 'Vermont-style' carry was now 'Vermont/Alaska/Arizona/Wyoming-style'; the House of Representatives had just passed, by a hefty margin, a national CCW reciprocity bill; there was a shooting-based game show on prime-time national TV; and you could buy a collapsible-stock AR carbine with a bayonet lug in Wal-Mart, the people in the gun shop would have laughed in your face and told you to stop telling tall tales. And not about the 'time travel' part, either, because that was plausible by comparison.

This was all a bit before my time. I grew up in Jersey but my parents were gunnies so that helped. By the time I was old enough to really "get" the headaches of gun laws in NJ we had moved to Upstate New York. And yes, they both had carry permits up there, and a "pre ban" AR15. Again I liked guns but was too young and too poor to have my own.

Then I moved to Indiana and started buying my own stuff, and it was night and day.
And given my westward move this line from Tam is a bit chilling.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Under ObamaCare, the IRS becomes the arbiter of health-insurance acceptability. Now Barack Obama needs the IRS to rescue ObamaCare entirely, thanks to a massive legislative defect that the President has no hope of rectifying in the new Congress. Thanks to sloppy legislative work, the PPACA’s subsidies to taxpayers won’t apply in states that refuse to create exchanges — which means that the states have a clear mechanism to block ObamaCare’s implementation.

Whoopsie? Talk about passing the bill to find out what's in it.

You can guess the "solution" the admin wants. Just have the IRS "fix" the law. We're seeing a pretty good example of "Living Constitution" logic at work here. The law as written is a massive boondoggle that's shot itself in the foot? Never-fear, we'll just pretend that we passed the bill we wanted to pass.

Unfortunately for Obama, federal agencies can create rules — but they cannot amend statutes. Neither can executive orders. If the statute does not authorize premium assistance in federal exchanges, then it would require an act of Congress to amend the statute to allow it.

Though again, the administration might see this failure as a feature not a bug, and use it to force states to comply. Isn't that nice?

Ahhh. Well firstly, that said violence is increasing is factually wrong. Secondly, it's "Gun Death" all over again. The idea that certain crimes are especially bad because of the tool used. And finally, there's magical thinking, that the item is at fault here.

Monday, November 14, 2011

For me the hardest part of acquiring Kahr's sub-compact 45 was buying one of the dang things. At the time they were in short supply. However, once I found one at a gun shop I was able to make the purchase, clear NCIS and take it home immediately. That's how it works in Indiana and the bulk of the US

Now for those who don’t know we have a bullshit system here in Mass where guns first need to be approved for “Safety”. BTW some well-known guns that are “Unsafe” for Massachusetts are everything in the Glock line, as well as all handguns made by Springfield Armory or Colt. Now Colt and Springer just didn’t want to play with the Attorney General’s stupid games and never submitted a single unit for testing. Companies like Kahr and Glock submitted EVERYTHING they had (this was destructive testing and likely cost millions), the guns passed the safety tests…but the AG decided in his infinite wisdom that the guns were still “Unsafe” and couldn’t be sold.

Ok so how does one get around this. First the law ONLY effects FFL transfers, so you can privately sell these guns all you want. (well we’re allowed 4 sales per year) There is one exception, is an FFL can transfer guns that are given to you through a will estate. I didn’t feel like asking one of my friends or relatives to buy one and then die…I like the gun but not that much, I needed to look at the other options. One way is to have an officer buy a gun (cops are exempted from all our bullshit laws) and then sell the gun to you. There are several cops in the state that run a racket like that. The other is to get somebody to move into state, get their LTC and then sell it.

Get that? Whole product lines from major companies are "banned", but only for the proles. If you're police, well, not only can you buy them but you can sell them. Oh, and if you happen to move to Mass and then are deemed worthy of a licencee to posses... then you can pick up your guns and sell them.

Clearly, safety is at the forefront of the Attorney General's mind here.

And by the way... both guns (in fact all of Karh's guns) were made in Worcester... Massachusetts.

Safe enough to make (and tax) in Mass, safe enough for the police to own, safe enough for the police to sell, safe enough to bring into the state... but not safe enough to for the commoner to buy.

Friday, November 11, 2011

It's Armistice Day. The day the guns fell silent.[1] And no matter how much Congress or your Social Studies teacher wants to retcon it to a safely generic holiday for "Veterans," that is why this day falls on this date. The Brits, somewhat more felicitously, call it "Remembrance Day," and it should indeed be that.

You can't express your gratitude to the men who fought the first mechanized war. Even the ones who were not ground in the gears are gone now; all that's left are scars on the landscape [2], redrawn maps that were scribbled over again a generation later, histories, monuments.

The large, metal-framed “safety tent” — which will be guarded by an all-female patrol — can accommodate as many as 18 people and will be used during the day for women-only meetings, said Occupy Wall Street organizers.

Talk about rebuilding from day one. They've got the basic tenants of state-sanctioned force and the risk of harriers and bandits absconding and abusing women.

Soon they'll discover agriculture.

Also this is in New York City where legal ownership of self defense tools (from handguns to even tasers and such) is only for agents of the state and the very highest of the elite.

But why would someone need a tool that can inflict massive pain and physical damage no mater the physique of the user?

Allahpundit stresses the seriousness.

Let it sink in: Their protests now need rape shelters. This is actually happening. And New York City lets it go on.

...

This can’t be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did. If you missed it when I posted it last week, go watch the ad the DNC ran in August 2009 when tea partiers first started showing up to town halls on ObamaCare. That set the tone. We began the year with tea-party pols being smeared as killers over a shooting they had nothing to do with and we end it with actual rapes being shrugged off by the press because they’re bad PR for a movement they support. Disgrace.

Remember this next time you hear the media click their tongues over a protest they don't like or when they gush over one they do like.

Friday, November 4, 2011

This compilation of old hippies pining for revolution amongst college kids who simply don’t want to make their own way is the unsurprising result of liberalism in America today. This is what happens when children are fed faux lessons in self esteem and tolerance from broken family systems and then taught in school that the theory of communism is noble, if only the implementation could be mastered. American students are engulfed in a sea of liberalism from kindergarten through university, often void of any opposing views and without prompting to study the historical precedent and common sense consequences of the ideology with which they’re being indoctrinated.

Well, surely these folks ccan master the implementation.

Nope, not so much

In a hilariously idiotic display of irony, Occupy Wall Street is experiencing firsthand the failure of the system they are clamoring for. They squabbled over how to properly distribute the over half a million dollars in donations they received. Some people felt they deserved more because they were doing more activist work, versus those who spent their occupying days playing drum circles or doing, well, nothing. What's incredible is that the same people arguing over how to redistribute the wealth given them are pushing for a complete American system of wealth redistribution. They see no correlation between their own inability to "fairly" distribute money and that government mandated wealth distribution would just assuredly fail as well, but on a massive, nation-shaking economic scale.

Clearly, the problem is that they don't have enough power to enforce their ideas.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Two big planks of her platform are "fixing the schools" and controlling those evil guns.
Problem is that Indianapolis schools are not under the control of the Mayor.
And neither is gun laws, since Indiana passed a state level preemption law banning any locality from making their own laws.

But that hasn't stopped Melina Kennedy!

Now she's attacking the incumbent Ballard for... not being in Mayors Against Illegal Guns!

Yes how dare he not be in an organization with a membership more likely to commit crime than the population at large, which is involved in illegal "sting" operations, and is really Mayor Bloomberg's gun control mouth piece.

And by pure coincidence guess who got 25 large from Bloomberg just before she started this new line of attack.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

I also wonder why Eugene Kane is so fearful of his fellow citizens and co-workers. Do you think as soon as you put a gun in someone’s hands they magically turn into murderers? Are people in Minnesota, which has a lower violent crime rate than Wisconsin, less safe because they have allowed shall-issue carry permits for years? What about Iowa, who’s violent crime rate is roughly the same as Wisconsin and also has shall-issue carry?

He's brimming with fear of all those proles being able to legally carry concealed now (nevermind that they could have illegally carried concealed or legally open carried previously...)

But then it gets silly:

Thankfully, the “No Weapons Allowed in the Building” sign has been posted at my job, which was a great relief for some of us who write the kind of stories that occasionally get the public agitated.

Seriously? He actually thinks that a sign would stop someone intent on harm? How?
In what world would a person who is willing to risk a murder rap be unwilling to risk an armed trespass charge?

So the original headline was: "Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?"

And we'll round out by going back to Wee'rd on the antis. They want you less free, less informed, and less able to defend yourself. But they're all about empowering criminals. Because it's not their fault they did bad things.